“It had nothing to do with me. I was just standing there when the guy took off running. I almost puked because I thought the guard in the tower was going to shoot at him, but the guy wasn’t a violent guy, just a petty burglar. The sirens, like, exploded, and I couldn’t tell if the sound was inside me or outside me. Guys literally crouched on the ground with their hands over their ears. And suddenly, this big porker guard is dragging me inside like it was my idea and they’re asking me, what did you know about this escape and when did you know it? I said, nothing! Nothing! Not a fucking...sorry, Mom. Not a thing! I don’t even know that guy! and they believed me but it was still ruined for me. I had to be inside all the time except for rec time.”

So Stefan made the best of that. At recreation, he started organizing guys who had any concept at all of team sport. He realized he had become a coach by osmosis from his dad; within a few months, he had trained a prison football team that was the envy of the Great Lakes region. (“These are very aggressive guys, you know. You had to watch them like they were attack dogs. It was called touch, but it was really tackle,” he told us.)

Eventually, it got too cold even for Stefan to do more than take a brief jog about the yard every day.

In the kitchen now, he drew two large ovals on the flip chart.

“So I thought, what do I want? What can I get other people to want?”

He drew an arrow from one oval to the other.

“I knew I wanted to eat good food once in a while. Basically, they feed you slop. I was living on canned carrots and bread.”

Once a month, the inmates got the chance to use hot plates and toaster ovens to make some of the food they remembered from home. So Stefan called restaurants and talked chefs into coming in and teaching a cooking demonstration. The cooking demonstrations soon became an institution, every couple of weeks, which even the most hardened guys loved. As the organizer, Stefan had his pick of everything—from linguine and bracciole to homemade tamales.

“I want you to know that the potatoes and carrots and stuff were cut up by the trusties in the kitchen. They most definitely did not give us guys knives. And you would have to be pretty crafty to hurt somebody with a hot plate. I was shocked that nobody tried. The worst was the guy who threw hot pepper sauce in the eyes of his sworn enemy. That was way worse than it sounds.”